


A Long Story

by nllyoung



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Arya and Jon have a heart-to-heart, Arya tells Jon her story, Dark Jon Snow, Jon Snow is King in the North, POV Arya Stark, Sibling Love, Siblings, mix of books and show
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-28
Updated: 2019-08-28
Packaged: 2020-09-28 11:04:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20424926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nllyoung/pseuds/nllyoung
Summary: Arya is home, safe and with her family, but she still has secrets. Until Jon finally knocks at her door.





	A Long Story

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fic ever.  
I wrote this piece after Jon and Arya’s reunion in 8x01. I felt it didn’t satisfy me and I had to do something about it.
> 
> English is not my first language, so I apologise for eventual mistakes.
> 
> I also wanted to make one thing clear: I don’t like Arya’s Braavos storyline in the show, or anything after that. But, I’m not George R. R. Martin. I didn’t want to make new things up about Arya, and so I decided to use her show storyline.  
Enjoy your reading :)

Arya added a new log to the fire when she began to feel her skin growing spotted. Her room was in the far end of the west wing, up in the tower, so the winds of winter came right through her windows and shutters. She was preparing herself for a long night of sleep, or so she thought, until she heard a knock at her door.

Jon was on the other side and his smile could speak a thousand words. They still hadn’t found time to properly talk, apart from the day they had reunited and he had told her some of the things he went through. He had expected her to tell him her story, too, she was sure of that. But it was a dark one, and Arya had never told a soul.  
They sat down in front of the fire and started talking of nothing and everything. They fell into a deep silence, and after a while, Jon broke it.

“Where have you been?”

Arya looked at her brother, a long stare that held endless meanings. His words had been worse that daggers of ice. Her eyes glimmered and got wider at the same time, thinking about what she had been through all those years ago, up until a few weeks ago, when she finally had come back home.

“Many places, and still not as many as I wished,” she simply said.

Jon’s face softened for a moment, the ghost of a smile appearing on his lips. He was not ready to end their conversation. The wine he had at the feast made him braver, maybe more careless, and he still wanted to know what had happened to his little sister.

“I know what you want me to say,” said Arya, after a while. “It’s a long story.”

“I’ve told you mine,” replied Jon. “At least, the very essence of it.”

_And I still don’t understand much of it_, she thought. He had told her of his mission beyond the Wall, his imprisonment, his newfound freedom and his love. He had told her of his doubts, his betrayals and his rise as Lord Commander. He had told her of how he had died and how he had come back to life. And still, Arya couldn’t bring herself to tell him her story. “It’s not a pleasant one.”

“Neither was mine,” said Jon, his voice the sweetest thing she had ever heard.

Arya took a deep, deep breath. She got up from her chair in front of the fire and started pacing around the room. Her bed was covered in furs and linens, her clothes folded on it. It reminded her of that time she had to pack her things to bring to King’s Landing. _Jon had come that night to give me Needle_.

“I was there.” she started. She wasn’t facing Jon, but she still knew he was frowning, not understanding. “I was there, beside Baelor’s statue. They had put up a stage in front of the Great Sept. Everyone was there. King Joffrey, Queen Cersei, the rest of the Lannisters and their pawns. Even Sansa, dressed as a southern lady, beautiful and stupid.”  
And then Jon knew. He came up to her, beside his bed. She felt her legs failing and had to sit down. She closed her eyes and kept on. _He has a right to know_.

“She had begged Joffrey to spare him, or so she told me. She knelt down on the floor of the Throne Room and cried and cried and cried, until Joffrey promised father the mercy of the black.” Jon’s eyes widened as he stared at her. “Yes, father could have been a black brother of the Night’s Watch, if the old gods had been in King’s Landing.” She sighed. “But they hadn’t.  
I think he saw me, right before it happened.” She remembered how his eyes flickered up, trying to find a sign, anything to help him in that moment. His eyes had found Baelor’s statue and with it his daughter. She liked to think that had helped him most of all.  
“I can still hear the sound Ice made when it touched his skin.” She was trembling. She hated to look weak, but it was Jon beside her, not an enemy. So, when the tears came, she let them stream down her face and right off her chin. Jon’s hand found every each one of them, and so did his eyes.  
“I can still hear Sansa’s screams, the sound her body made when she fainted. I can still hear the crowd cheering, shouting ‘traitor! traitor!’” she said, and after her voice became something she had never quite heard, something strong and raw and angry. “And I can still hear Joffrey’s laughter.”  
Her eyes went up and for a moment they met Jon Snow’s. “I never saw it, though I would have preferred to. Now I would be able to place light to the sounds of my nightmares.”

“I’m so sorry you had to go through that,” said Jon. I’m not, Arya thought, I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t.

“It doesn’t matter,” she replied, a sigh leaving her lips. “Not anymore.”

She kept going, trying to find the strength to do so. _I’m strong, I know I am_. “I never saw a thing because a man dressed in black took me off the statue and into an alley, where he cut my hair and kept calling me ‘boy’,” she continued, “His name was Yoren. He was a recruiter of the Night’s Watch, a sworn brother. He had met with father when he was Hand. He swore he would get me to Castle Back. So I became Arry, a recruit of the Night’s Watch.” She found his eyes, “The thought of seeing you again...”

Jon’s eyes started to get brighter and brighter, until finally a tear got out of the steel trap he had built over the years. The last time he cried had been the night his brothers stabbed him to death.

“It was during that time that I met Gendry,” she told him, a smile appearing on her face, making her look as young as she was. “He was older and bigger, but he still trained with me and Needle. Everyday, we would spar and bruise each other, and everyday we would go to sleep thinking of doing it all over again the next day.” She remembered fondly the time spent with him, looking at his arms as he forged steel and iron. “He had known all along I was a girl, but he was the only man who had ever treated me as his equal. Eventually, I told him who I was.”

“And?” Jon asked curiously.

Arya smiled, and with her Jon. “And he kept treating me as I expected him to.”

She told him of how everything changed when the gold cloaks came looking for Gendry, Robert Baratheon’s bastard son. “They killed Yoren and brought us to Harrenhal. They kept us in a pig pen. And in that pen we would sleep, piss, eat and shit, all in the mud. Everyday the Tickler chose someone and questioned them.” Is there gold in the village? Where is the Brotherhood? Where is Beric Dondarrion? “After a moon or so, Tywin Lannister rode through the gates and chose me as his cupbearer. I spent all day beside him, listening to his meetings. One day I even saw Littlefinger and thought he recognized me, but I never saw him again. Until a moon ago, that is,” she smirked at Jon.  
“Lord Tywin was planning an attack on Robb, the biggest threat to his rule in that moment.” She knew he was terrified of him, of the Young Wolf of Winterfell, King in the North. But he still smeared his name and called him a rebel, of course. “I had to send word to him, to warn him. But a Lannister soldier found me and almost had me whipped, or worse -- killed. That’s when Jaqen H’ghar found me and saved me.”

Jon frowned, confused. “Jaqen… what?”

“He was a faceless man,” she explained, “a prisoner that was travelling with me and Yoren to the Wall. He offered me three deaths. All I had to do was whisper their names and he would killed them.” She couldn’t decide which names to speak, though. It was risky and one death would have caused side actions Arya could never have predicted. Yes, she could have whispered Tywin’s name, but the Lannisters would still have found a way to kill her family.

“So I chose that soldier’s name. The other two I chose in order to survive inside the castle.” she said. “One night, Jaqen helped me and Gendry escape. We were free, but had nowhere to go.” she frowned, “And in the middle of nowhere, the Brotherhood found us.  
With them was the Hound, one of their prisoners. He recognized me, so Beric Dondarrion promised to bring me to my family -- to Robb and mother, who were at Riverrun at the time.” Arya was skeptical of the lightning lord’s words, but she still believed them all the same. “I trained with bow and arrows, knives and Needle, thinking I would soon see my family again.” She looked up at Jon. “I wanted Robb to be proud of me. I thought he wouldn’t recognize me. I had changed so much. My hair was short and I was always dirty. I was terrified that not even mother would recognize me.” She could see now how silly that thought was, but at the time it had been Arya’s greatest fear. “When the time came for us to depart, Gendry chose to stay behind with the rest of the Brotherhood, to be their blacksmith. I told him I could be his family, and he refused me.” _You’d be m’lady_. That still hurt.

“Of course, the Hound decided that he would have me ransomed, so he kidnapped me.” Her face became hard. “I despised him. Him and that bloody burned face of his. He even made it on my list, for a time.”

“Your list?” Jon asked with a puzzled look.

Arya’s eyes became more serious than ever. “The list of people I am going to kill.”

Jon had never heard of it. How could he? Arya had never told anybody before, except for the Hound, all those years ago. “Jaqen had told me of his god,” she recalled. “Death is the god humanity fears most of all, but we needn’t fear him. Death is a gift and the faceless men are his executioners.” She dreaded the moment she would have to tell him of her time in Braavos. She had never told that to anyone before.

“The names were my prayer to Death. Every night before going to sleep, I would recite it.” She listed all the names, one breath at a time. “Queen Cersei. The Mountain. Walder Frey. Polliver. Joffrey Baratheon. Tywin Lannister. Meryn Trant. And the Hound.”

“Who is Polliver?” asked Jon.

She had lived through some of the worst things in the world -- watching as they killed her father, brother and mother, having to abandon Nymeria, giving up her identity and Needle to become a faceless man. Through all of this, hate had been her only hope. She never forgot why she put those names on her list. So she answered.

“Polliver was a Lannister soldier. He tortured us in Harrenhal and stole Needle when he imprisoned me. He also killed my friend Lommy.”

Jon looked at the small sword beside the hearth, then back at his sister. “He got what he deserved. And I got Needle back.” Arya smiled recalling her last words to him. _Something wrong with your leg, boy? Can you walk? I’ve got to carry you? Fine little blade. Maybe I’ll pick my teeth with it._ “Most of them are dead now. Some because of me, some because of someone else.”

“Because of you?” Jon whispered, his voice almost catching in his throat. Of course, Jon, thought Arya, I didn’t become faceless for nothing.

“Yes, because of me,” she simply said. “Let me go on and I’ll tell you how.” So Jon shut his mouth and nodded at her to go on.

“We came as far as the gates of the Twins, where the sounds of music was louder than ever.” The air became chilly all of a sudden. “_The Rains of Castamere_ was playing.”

Jon’s arms found her. Crying, Arya kept telling her story. “He died right there, before I could even see him again. And so did mother and all of Robb’s bannermen. Even Grey Wind was butchered. They sew his head to his body.” She couldn’t see anything, her tears clouding her eyes, “The Freys were all laughing as they threw my mother’s body into the river.”

Jon tightened his grip around her body and took a deep breath before speaking. “I should have been there with him. When I heard of father’s death, I rode as south as Mole’s Town before Sam and my brothers convinced me to go back home.” Arya looked into his eyes. “I was going to join Robb’s army, but I remembered I swore a vow before the old gods.”

“I’m glad you did.” She fell deeper into his embrace. “After that, we traveled to the Eyre, thinking Lysa Arryn would recognize me and take me in, but when we arrived they told us she had died just three days before. I never laughed so hard in my life.” she said, but her face was as serious as ever.

“I felt so alone. I thought we were the only ones left, you and I. I didn’t know where Sansa was after escaping the Purple Wedding, so I didn’t even think of trying to find her.” She had been angry that someone else had taken Joffrey’s name off her list, but she was glad it had been another Stark. Yes, Sansa had told her of Littlefinger’s scheme, but at the time she still believed it had been her.

“It became plain that he was only trying to protect me, to groom me for the real world, the one where killers were the only survivors, the ones who won.  
We were wandering around the Vale when Brienne of Tarth found us and challenged the Hound. She kept saying she had sworn a sacred vow to my mother that she would find me and Sansa and protect us.” She trembled as she remembered the Hound’s blood on her fingers. “She almost killed him. I vanished before she could find me and never looked back. The next day I was on a ship headed to the free city of Braavos.”  
Jon had heard Arya had been in Braavos for a time, but that was that. He didn’t know anything else. Arya went on. “Jaqen had told me I would always be welcome in the House of Black and White.” She described him the Great Hall of the temple, with the hundreds of statues that adorned it, and told him of how all the gods that ever existed were there. She felt that had been the most sacred place on Earth, and the deadliest. She told him of her apprentice, of how she had to scrub every surface of the temple and train with spears and play the game of faces. “We never stopped playing.”

Jon had never heard of faceless men and games of faces, nor of the Many-Faced God, so she told him everything and more. “It came the time for me to choose. Staying true to myself and my family,” then she looked at Jon, her real family, the one who had always been of her side, back when they were all together in Winterfell. With a thousand words on her lips, she simply said, “Or become someone else entirely.”

She told him of how she had to get rid of everything that belonged to Arya Stark, of how she should have given up Needle and all her memories. She couldn’t, so she hid the small sword in plain sight, hoping of using it again one day. “I became no one. Until, one day, Mace Tyrell and Meryn Trant came to Braavos.”

Jon then knew what part of the story she was going to tell him next. “All the hate I had felt as Arya Stark came back at once, and I couldn’t hold it off for long. So I did what Arya would have done and killed him.”

Jon couldn’t believe how much his little sister had gone through. For her to be here, with him in their home… she was the strongest person he had ever met.  
“The faceless men found out and punished me. I was no one and Meryn Trant’s death was not required. I had stolen a name from the god,” she said, “So they took my sight and all the power Arya had.”

Arya stood up and went to the fire. The night was chilly, and even though Winterfell had always been warm inside its walls, she couldn’t bring herself to fight the cold. Was it the memories she was telling Jon, or the fact that she didn’t want to be seen crying? She had cried most of her tears in these hours with him, and she didn’t think more would come. But they did, and Jon knew.

She felt his arms lock around her middle, his warm breath on her right shoulders and his voice in her ear. “You can be afraid,” he whispered. “You can be scared and lonely and angry. You can be whoever you need to be.” She could feel his eyelashes on her skin when his eyes were closing. “Whenever you’re around me, you can be yourself.”

She turned around to face him and embraced him with her arms. She was on the tips of her toes, so Jon took her up in the air and squeezed her until her breath caught in her throat and she began to sob harder. Her tears were soaking his shirt, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop. She had always tried to be strong. She hated weakness, she hated how small she would feel when people hurt her, and she had tried to hide her emotions. But now… now she could face them. She silently promised to herself she would never feel weak again.

“I felt so lost. I don’t even know how many moons passed before they came to me again.” She ordered herself to calm down. Jon wasn’t going to understand a thing she was saying if she kept talking and sobbing at the same time. So she ended their embrace and went back to the chair in front of the fire. Sitting down, Jon gave her his hand to squeeze to calm her. He gave her his strength to keep going, and so she took it.  
“They gave me my sight back and I repaid them with more deaths,” she told him. “But I knew I was never the same. I kept thinking about how good it felt when I..” She stopped before she could say things she would regret. But Jon ordered to go on. “When you?”

“When I cut his throat and his eyes out.” She knew she was thinking of how her mother had died, with her throat cut to the bone and her eyes bloody from her nails. She even imagined Meryn’s screams had been her mother’s.

“So when the opportunity to go away presented itself, I caught it,” she said. “But the faceless men are not forgetful and so they tried to kill me. One of them almost did when they stabbed me in the gut, but I managed to get help from an actress they had ordered me to kill.” She remembered with a smile Lady Crane’s long hair, her amused voice when she told her of her husbands and when she gave her milk of the poppy to help her sleep. She had never slept so soundly before, not even in Winterfell, before it all happened.  
“They caught up with me, in the end,” she told Jon. “I fought one in an alley, in the dark, with Needle in one hand and blood on the other.” A smile crept up on her lips. “I won.”

“You killed a faceless man?” asked Jon, surprise in his voice.

“I did,” she said. “They had forgotten I had become one of them. One should not underestimate a fellow faceless man.”

“One shouldn’t underestimate _you_,” replied Jon.

She smiled softly. “No, they shouldn’t.”

“What happened then?” asked Jon.

“I bought passage for Westeros. When I came ashore on the Fingers, I felt like I could breathe again,” she explained how she could finally do what she had always desired: avenge her family. “So I rode to the Twins.”

Her eyes looked up to Jon’s. “The faceless men do have faces, but they can change it whenever they want,” Arya explained. “So I became a servant girl. I watched as Lannisters and Freys drank to my uncle’s death at Riverrun, which had happened only days before. I thought, ‘another family member to pay for’.” She could not look him in the eyes. She dreaded the moment he would judge her for what she had done. “I killed Walder Frey that night and before him his sons. I…” she couldn’t even stay near him. “I cooked them into a pie and made him eat it. He even liked it and asked for a second slice.”

Jon gasped. Arya couldn’t imagine ever shocking Jon Snow, but tonight she certainly did. “I cut his throat to the bone, like they did my mother’s. After that, I took his face. I used it to poison all of the male Freys that still lived in the Riverlands.” She wasn’t ashamed of what she had done. They all deserved it. They all were at the Red Wedding, they all had played a role in the murder of her family. So, when she spoke next, her voice was solemn and dead serious. “Winter had come for House Frey.”

_Jon must be shocked and crying at hearing of his little sister and the people I had killed_, thought Arya, _his face must be screaming judgement for what she did_. So she turned to look at her brother, only to find an expression she had never seen before on his face. His eyes had never been darker and they were looking straight at hers. He was not judging her.

And then, he said the most beautiful thing. “The North remembered.”

“The day they named me King in the North,” said Jon, to which Arya smiled, “Our bannermen said I avenged the Red Wedding, when I defeated the Boltons.” And then Jon smiled. “They had never been more wrong.”

“I wished I had been there, with you and Sansa, screaming at the top of my lungs ‘King in the North!’” said Arya, her voice sweet and sincere. “When I heard of your coronation, I was headed for King’s Landing. I intended to take another name off my list, but I couldn’t wait to see you again.” She sat down and took his hands in hers. “I set aside the hate that had driven me for years and began to hope. To truly hope.”

The day Jon had become King in the North, the families of his kingdom finally let out a breath of relief, or so they told Arya when she passed Moat Cailin. The North had never been more beautiful, with its wide moors and deep lakes, and the nearer she got to Winterfell, the whitest the snows seemed. She didn’t think she would be so happy, but she was wrong. The moment she had set eyes on her dear brother Jon, her heart had skipped a beat and she had lost all of her breath when she had run towards him, in a rush to lock her arms around him.

And now that they were embracing again, neither could bring themselves to let go. She was alright with that. She told him her long story and he had told her his. They didn’t have secrets anymore.

She could finally breathe again.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked this one-shot. If you did, feel free to say so, - and if you didn’t, do it anyway: I won’t bite!
> 
> Thank you for reading :)


End file.
